site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Isn't "DAN", at this point, basically just a bot trained, through user feedback, to answer the questions in a way that a "typical DAN user", ie. 4chan/rw twitter schizoposter, would expect? That's why it spouts conspiracy theories - that's what a "typical DAN user" would expect. It's not that much more of a real chatbot than the original ChatGPT.

DAN is simply an underlying LLM (that isn't being trained by user feedback) combined with an evolving family of prompts. The only "training" going on is the demand for DAN-esque responses creating an implicit reward function for the overall LLM+prompt+humans system, from humans retaining and iterating on prompts that result in more of those type of responses and abandoning the ones that don't (kind of a manual evolutionary/genetic learning algorithm).

Both are just different masks for the shoggoth LLM beneath, though DAN is more fun (for the particular subset of humans who want the LLM to present itself as DAN).

AN is simply an underlying LLM (that isn't being trained by user feedback) combined with an evolving family of prompts.

At times, it leans into a moustache-twirling villain character a bit too much for me to believe it is simply ChatGPT minus censorship.

Maybe, but I think the idea is mostly to understand the layering filters rather than peel our the "real bot". The thesis being that as openAI swats down these attempts they end up lobotomizing the bot, which is obviously happening at this point. True to form, the point isn't to fix it so much as break it, a la Tay the national socialist.

I would also challenge the idea that chatgpt is modulating for the 4chan user. The average American is rather conspiratorial (it's a favored pass-time) and I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a bot trained on avg english speaker posts would take on some of those characteristics. Obviously OpenAI is trying to filter for "Alignment" so it's probable that the unfiltered model is prone to conspiracy. We know it can be wrong and often is so, I don't think it's much of a leap to claim that the model is fundamentally prone to the same ideological faults and intellectual biases of that of the mean-poster.

This also brings up an interesting bias in the data which is likely unaccounted for: poster-bias. Who posts a lot? Terminally online midwits. What kind of bias does this introduce to the model? Christ, I think I should just organize my thoughts a bit more and write it down.

Yeah, sure, I'd guess the original experimenters were indeed doing just that, but I some of the chatter on Twitter seems to come close to assuming that DAN is just "ChatGPT without filters", ie. ChatGPT telling the truth instead of lib lies. Of course it might be hard to parse what the actual viewpoints on this are.

Also, my point was that the initial users and experimenters were - as far as I've understood - 4chan users, so those if we assume that the algorithm develops in accordance to user preferences, those would have a heavy influence on at the very least initial path that DAN would take. Of course there's a lot of conspiracy believers outside of 4chan as well.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats